Return to the Pet Semetery
by DaynaFoxe
Summary: Eileen Goldman discovers that her past has been hidden from and her old identity has been essentially stolen from her. Upon this rediscovery there is also an insurmountable urge to return to Ludlow. Will Ellie be able to resist the power of The Place anymore than her Father, or will she join her parents and brother in the discovery that sometimes, dead is better?


(Ellie's birthday is around the middle of February; she turned 6 in 1984; Irwin Goldman was 58 or 59 in 1984; Gage would have been about a year old when they moved to Maine, and about 20-22 months old at death. His birthday would probably have been mid-summer)

Eileen Rachel Goldman stood in front of the vanity in her bedroom, wanting to give herself a last minute inspection but unable to. The mirror on the vanity was covered with a sheet, as was every other mirror in the house. She wore a black dress that stopped just below knees that were still knobby and child-like and an open black cardigan over it. Her stockings were dark and her shoes were flat and black. No make-up and no embellishments, as was custom. Her wavy brown hair fell to her shoulders, parted to the left and layered, neatly brushed but without any product. The array of body sprays and perfumes on the vanity remained unused today. It was January, 1996. She would not turn eighteen for more than a month.

A gentle knock on the bedroom's door frame made her turn her head. Her grandmother's best friend, Ruth Holtzman, stood there. "It's time to go, Eileen." Her voice was gentle, but implacable. Time was up. No more foot dragging, no putting it off. Such things as this must be dealt with, quickly and with dignity. Eileen followed without a word.

She had lived with her grandparents for as long as she could remember. She knew there had been a time before that; she knew that she'd had a Mother and a Father, of course, and she knew that she'd had a sibling once upon a time. A younger brother. But she did not exactly remember them. Thinking of them hurt her, or had at first, and so she had avoided it. Her grandparents were all too happy to oblige this; no pictures remained of her parents and brother in their home, save for one of her Mother as a child with another, unnamed, little girl that stayed in the top drawer of the desk in her grandfather's study, and they did not speak of her parents or brother, either. It had taken time, but eventually her nightmares had faded. The more she had forgotten, the more she had avoided, the more the pain and the fear dissipated. And so forgetting had been a therapy to her, and she had turned this therapy into an art form. No, she didn't remember well at all. If she were completely honest, she didn't even recall her parents names, exactly. Her Father had been either Louis or Laurence she thought; possibly Lyle, though she really didn't think so. Her Mother she knew had been Rachel, but only because she knew her middle name had been her Mother's. She did remember her brother's name though, somehow. It had been Greg, short for Gregory.

The service was short. Eileen declined standing up to speak; it had been a very long time since she had enjoyed attention focused on her, not since times before she could remember. Family friends surrounded her, mostly older women, a few older men. Most of her own friends were in school, but her best friend Sue Schueler had come anyway; Eileen's boyfriend of two years, Gray Markovitz, had managed to get away before his college classes began, and he attended the funeral as well. Gray was nineteen, and attended the University of Chicago as a pre-law student. Blonde haired, hazel eyed and a champion swimmer from a good family, both of Eileen's grandparents had been utterly charmed when she brought him home. Truth be told, Irwin Goldman would not have said a word against anyone Eileen brought home; pushing his daughter away had taught him that lesson painfully well and he was not about to have a repeat with his granddaughter. Eileen was the only member of her own family attending her grandmother's funeral; there was no one else left in the family now but her.

Eileen did not remember what happened to her parents and brother; she only recalled that there had been an accident of some sort. She understood that it may have been her Father's fault, or at least that her Grandfather blamed him. Her questions about them fell on deaf ears, but any mention of her Father angered her Grandfather deeply, and he left the room and locked himself in his study the few times she'd tried to ask, his face red with rage. Once, he had sent her away and told her it was time to get ready for bed in the mid-afternoon; another time, when her Grandfather had drank too much scotch at dinner and thought Eileen already asleep, she had overheard her Grandfather angrily discussing her Father with her Grandmother, who was trying to shush him. Eileen was unable to hear most of the conversation, but she had caught the phrase "good-for-nothing-son-of-a-bitch" a handful of times. It didn't anger her; she merely accepted it as matter-of-fact. She didn't remember her Father, and she loved her Grandfather, so there seemed no reason to defend her Father; she had no way to argue that her Grandfather was wrong, because she simply didn't know. That was not to say she believed her Father to be a horrible man; she had no reason to think that either, not remembering him. Surely, she thought, if he had truly been the cause of her family's demise, it had been a mistake and not willful maliciousness on his part. In all the years Eileen had lived with her grandparents, nearly twelve of them, the most information she had gotten was being occasionally told that she looked like her Mother, particularly when she was dressed up.

Gray drove Sue and Eileen to the cemetery in near silence. Irwin Goldman had died two years prior, when Eileen was fifteen. His wife would be buried with him. Eileen didn't know where her parents and brother were buried; she had never been taken to visit any of their graves, and as far as she remembered she had not attended any funerals or memorials for them. At the cemetery, Eileen and Gray recited the Kaddish with the other mourners who were able, easily recalling the language from their respective bat mitzvah and bar mitzvah. Eileen was the first to sprinkle a handful of soil over the polished blue casket and gently laid a flower on top. Though she had been an orphan for most of her life, that moment was the first when she really felt that she was.

Eileen Goldman did not remember having another last name. It had occurred to her at some point that her Father's last name could not have been Goldman, because that was her Mother's parents name, but she did not know that her own name had not always been Goldman. She did not remember her brother's death happening before her parent's. She did not remember coming to Chicago with her Mother afterward, leaving her Father behind temporarily. She remembered nothing that followed, not her Mother returning to Maine on her own, not the call two days later that informed the Goldman's that they had lost their only remaining child and were now their granddaughter's only living relatives. By that point, Eileen had been in a state that could best be described as near catatonic. That had been in late May of 1984. Eileen was released from the hospital within a week, but attempted to hang herself in early June 1984 when the nightmares refused to stop. This resulted in a six week stay in a mental health facility. When she was released, her name was Eileen Goldman. That was when the nightmares began to stop, and the forgetting began. She was signed into school that September, in the 1st Grade, as Eileen Goldman. No one knew her as anything else. No one asked about her parents. No one asked about her brother. No one asked about them, no one spoke about them, and before long Eileen mostly ceased thinking about them. Her Mother and Father, her brother, her old life. It all became a deeply buried secret. In time, Eileen mostly forgot that the secret had even existed. Only Irwin and Dory, who knew the lively soul their granddaughter had once been, would have known the mark left on Eileen by the tragedy she suffered through. Once bubbly and outgoing, she remained quiet and withdrawn in her new life.

After the burial, people came and went for most of the day and into the night. Almost all of them brought food of one type or another; Eileen wasn't sure why. It was only her living there now, and there was no way she would ever go through even half of it, and it was against customs to give any of it away. Mrs. Holtzman stayed until about 6pm, micromanaging everything. She promised to check on Eileen the next day and told her not to hesitate to call if she needed anything. The list of numbers Eileen had been left with was half a foot long by the time everyone filtered out, leaving only Eileen and Gray. He was staying the weekend with her before heading back to school for the start of classes. When he left, Eileen planned to alternate staying at Sue's home and having Sue stay with her until she graduated high school in June. In August she would join Gray at the University of Chicago, where she planned to study music and psychology. She did not know that her Father had studied medicine there; she did not know her Father had been a doctor, or a college graduate, at all.

Eileen was extremely fortunate in one way; she would not have to worry about how she would support herself. Her grandfather's business had ended up being incredibly successful, and Eileen was the only one left to inherit the money. Stocks & bonds, bank accounts, college funds set up for her, their little home in the suburbs of Chicago, owned free and clear. Eileen was no dummy, nor was she irresponsible. Her entry into young adulthood would be smooth, though rather lonely. She had very few close friends, and now her only family was gone. She supposed that what had happened to her Mother and brother had aged her grandparents prematurely; neither of them had managed to reach 70. She didn't know anything about her Aunt Zelda; not how she had died, not that she had even existed.

The morning after her grandmother's funeral, Eileen and Gray began hauling some boxes up from the basement. Eileen had always been curious as to what was down there, and just now she was having an overwhelming desire to change things around. To essentially erase things that reminded her of her grandparents. It was the way she had learned to cope with loss, and the desire burned in her like a fever now. She wanted the furniture changed, she wanted different dishes out, she wanted to rearrange, set up new decorations. There was also a practicality to everything; the house would be going up for sale in May or June. Eileen had no reason to keep it; she could stay with Gray or Sue when she wasn't at school, or she could get her own apartment, or share one with roommates. She had no reason to keep, and pay taxes, on the old home.

Eileen was in the kitchen, boxing up the old dishes, when Gray carried a medium sized cardboard box up from the basement. "Hey Eileen; any idea who 'Ellie' is?" he asked her.

Eileen shook her head, not paying a lot of attention. "No idea. Why?" In a book or a movie she would have felt some sense of trepidation, some sense of standing on the edge of an abyss of madness, but she felt nothing. Her old diminutive didn't even cast the slightest shadow in her mind. It had been well over a decade now since anyone had used it, after all.

Gray tilted the box so she could see and waited until she looked. She finally looked up with some impatience, then frowned. The permanent marker used to write on one flap of the box had faded quite a lot over the years, but she could still see the inscription, and that it was written in her grandmother's hand. "For Ellie".

Gray carried the box into the living room and set it on the floor, Eileen trailing behind him. She sat on her knees and carefully unfolded the flaps. There was an odd assortment of what appeared to be random items and knickknacks in the box. A large scrapbook or photo album appeared to be near the bottom, along with a folder of paperwork. Laid on top of everything was a sheet of stationary paper. Eileen recognized it as the type her grandmother had always been fond of, though she did not recognize the actual pattern. The paper was yellowed with time, and the blue pen handwriting was the same hand as that on the flap of the box. The message terse.

" _Eileen,_

 _You're Grandfather wanted this thrown away. I didn't have the heart to do it. You deserve the chance to know something about your past, about your family. And your parents and brother deserve to be remembered._

 _I hope the remembering won't hurt you too badly; I know how you are. By the time you find this, I suppose Grandpa Irwin and I will be gone. I hope you will remember us fondly and forgive us for hiding them away from you, and I hope you will understand why we did what we did._

 _Be well, Ellie._

 _With All My Love,_

 _Grandma Dory_

Gray read the note at the same time Eileen did, over her shoulder. Eileen read it through three times before setting it aside, expressionless. Her heart was beginning to gallop in her chest as she began to realize what treasures might lie within the box. Her eyes roved over the binder in the box. Pictures. She would get to see what her Mother and Father looked like. And her brother. Gregg. She felt an ache in her chest that she had not felt for a very long time at this last thought. He had been so young… A year or two younger than her, so three or four. All at once Eileen wanted to remember, wanted it more than anything.

Gray was giving her a bemused look. "So you're Ellie, than. I thought you didn't have any idea who Ellie was?" Eileen met his eyes and shrugged "I didn't. I don't, really. I still don't remember ever being called that." She was quiet for a moment, looking into the box thoughtfully. Her hands were folded in her lap, not quite daring to reach for the binder yet. "I guess I must have been called that once, though." she murmured quietly. Almost of their own accord her hands reached into the box and pulled the binder loose from the other debris. The cover was blue and cracking. It had probably been a bit old when it had been sealed into the box. Faded gold calligraphy, barely legible and with most of its shine worn away, proclaimed 'Family Memories'. Eileen ran her fingers over the cover lightly, then opened the book. She didn't realize that she held her breath as she did so.

The first photo in the album froze Eileen to the spot. A dark-haired man and a blonde woman sat on the floor in front of a Christmas tree. A blonde toddler sat in the woman's lap and a brown-haired little girl sat on the man's lap. Eileen was struck by how happy they all looked. Every one of them wore a smile, a genuine smile. Although the photo was clearly supposed to have been staged, the photographer (Eileen did not know it had been a man named Judson Crandall, and if she had the name would have been utterly meaningless) had managed to catch a natural moment as both parents gazed down at their children with expressions of pure adoration.

Eileen drank every detail of the picture. How handsome her Father was, how beautiful her Mother. Her brother's tiny baby teeth, his mouth open in the pure laughter only very small children seem capable of. The more she looked, the more the importance of it filtered through to her. There was a Christmas tree, so obviously she hadn't always been Jewish, or at least not only Jewish. Her Father must not have been. Seeing her Father, Eileen realized that she really did not look very much like her Mother. She had her Father's hair and eyes, his darker skin tone, and his nose. Looking at the picture, she realized she had her Mother's smile. Gregg looked more like their Mother. He had her eyes and her fine blonde hair. Looking at him, Eileen realized he must have been even younger than she thought; he couldn't have been even half her age.

"Are those your parents and your brother?" Gray asked, looking over her shoulder again. To his utter dismay, and for the first time in nearly five years, Eileen burst into tears.

Gray proved unable to understand Eileen's reaction to the album and so left her alone. He had never seen her overcome with emotion, normally she was preternaturally calm and collected. She remained sniffly as she looked through the album and the folder of paperwork throughout the afternoon. She revisited her own birthdays, her brother's, other holidays and events, her only trip to the beach shortly after their move to Maine (which she did not remember). Finally she sat quietly, the book open on the coffee table, a loose picture in her hand flipped around backwards. She was so intently focused on it that she didn't even notice when Gray returned to the living room with two glasses of iced tea.

"What are you looking at, Ei?" he asked her when he realized she was looking intently at the back of the photograph. She didn't respond at first, and he thought she didn't hear him. He was opening his mouth to repeat the question when Eileen finally spoke.

"My brother's name wasn't Gregg." she said in a matter-of-fact voice. She looked up at Gray and he felt a whistle of unease go through him at the look in her eyes. "His name was Gage." In her mind she vaguely heard a woman scream the name, but it meant nothing to her. She didn't know she was remembering her Mother screaming for the baby as he ran across their lawn towards the busy road on that fateful day in May of 1984. She looked back down at the back of the photograph. "Gage William Creed, who would have turned two on July 12th, 1984." she added in almost a sing-song voice that truly scared Gray. She looked back up at him. "My name was Eileen Louise Creed, but my parents and my brother called me Ellie. That's where the name came from, but I still don't remember ever being Ellie."

Eileen's eyes narrowed and turned to flint, and when she spoke again her voice was hard, not only with anger but with actual hatred. "They changed my name because I was named after my Father, Louis, and they hated him." She wasn't looking at Gray anymore, not really; she was looking through him. "They lied to me. They let me believe that my brother's name was Gregg when it wasn't, they let me believe he was three or four when he died when he wasn't even two, and they let me believe my whole family died together in some accident, some accident that my Father caused." She gestured absently to the paperwork on the coffee table. "My parents died about a week after my brother did. Gage was killed in a car accident, he was hit by a car in Maine. It was a house fire, the neighbor's house, and my parents must have been visiting or tried to help. We _lived_ in Maine when they died." Eileen finally looked directly at Gray, her eyes pained and bewildered. "Gray, I don't remember ever even _being_ in Maine, at all, and we lived there for almost an entire year. How could I forget that much?" A deep shame was spreading through Eileen. Shame and guilt. She had never challenged her Grandfather's view of her Father and now it felt like a deep betrayal. Letting herself forget them and move on felt like a deep betrayal.

Gray didn't know how to respond. "Eileen, they must have had some reason to do all that..." he started, trying to be reassuring and logical, but the ferocity of the gaze she turned on him stopped him on the spot. "I told you why they did it; they hated my Father." For a moment Eileen turned back into the six year old child she had been when she had moved back to Chicago, her eyes screwed up into slits and her nose wrinkled, her voice a high warble "They always hated my Daddy, they always said he wasn't good enough for Mommy! I bet they were happy when _he_ died!"

"Eileen!" Gray cried, and something about the fear in his voice must have snapped her out of her fugue. She blinked unfocused eyes at him as if trying to clear them. "We lived in Maine." she repeated. "Ludlow. Ludlow, Maine. The old address is here." She tapped one of the papers on the table. Eileen tried to smile, but it was a bad parody of the expression. "My Father was a doctor, you know. He went to the University of Chicago, too." There was a disconnected yet still conversational tone to her voice.

Gray scooped the papers and photo album up off the table and put them haphazardly back into the box. He'd had enough, and Eileen was really beginning to scare him. She protested, but only weakly. In the back of her mind she was aware that Gray would be leaving soon enough, the next day in fact, and she would have plenty of time to look through everything in the box for as long as she wanted, over and over again if she wanted…

Gray put the box back in the basement the next day before he left, and told Eileen to leave it there. "The past is the past, Eileen. Just forget about it for now and concentrate on the future. You have college coming up in August, and you have to get through the rest of this school year." Eileen nodded absently, hearing him but not listening, not really. He put his hand on her shoulder. "Eileen, listen; just forget about it until you graduate at least, okay? This summer, maybe, we'll look at it together, but you have too much on your plate right now already. Okay, Eileen?" Eileen looked at him finally, really paying attention, and nodded. He kissed the top of her head before he left.

Eileen watched him pull away with the cordless phone in her hand. As soon as he disappeared from view she called Sue to tell her not to come over, that she was just going to finish up a few things and than she would head over to Sue's. While she spoke to her, her eyes never left the basement door and she never blinked. When she hung up she sat on the couch, hands clasped, and continued to stare at the basement door. She sat that way until Gray called to tell her he was back at school. Once she hung up with him she went to the basement and dug the box back out. There was an irresistible urge, an irresistible pull, to it. More than that, there was irresistible desire to find a particular paper in the box. Eileen finally pulled the incredibly thin sheet of yellow paper she was after free from the box. The address was printed on it, the address in Ludlow, Maine.

Eileen contemplated the address in silence in the dusty basement. This place, this was the last place her family was whole, the very last place where it had even existed. So much of who she was had been was lost at that house. So much of who she had been. So much that she couldn't remember anymore, that had been taken from her by her grandparents actions and inactions, and from her own. She walked back upstairs and picked up the house phone again. She would be eighteen on February 17th. Spring Break was the second week of April. She had off most of the week, and she could afford the extra two days if she wanted them. It would give her enough time to do a little digging, see if any neighbors were left who might remember her and her family. She bit her lip, than dialed the number.

"Hello? My name is Eileen, Creed. I'd like a flight to Bangor International Airport, departing from O'Hare, on April 5th or 6th."


End file.
